Validate Business Idea with our 4 easy steps that will give you 10x result
Do you want to validate your business idea?
Is it a new strategy for your new business, a new product or service?
Want to learn how to avoid wasting your time and money to a business idea where nobody wants?
In this post, I’m going to share four ways to help you assess if your business idea has a potential market.
Before diving straight to our topic proper, let me give you a little bit background of a new business idea we’ve validated using Google AdWords.
Background of the New Idea
Mobidock wanted to confirm if their motorcycle docking station has a market potential.
Mobidock docking station is a collection of six interlocking parts for motorcycle. It has Docking Port cradle that clamps the front wheel of motorcycle to docked securely upright.
They wanted to attract motorcycle enthusiasts and big bike riders to pre-order the Mobidock docking station.
Their main objective is to find out if their target market are willing to purchase their product.
Now, let’s take a look at the ways Mobidock has applied to validate their business idea.
4 Ways How to Validate Business Idea
Know your customers
Many small business owners get too excited to promote and produce their new product without knowing and understanding their audience better.
Taking time to validate your product and market assumptions will save you a lot of time, money, and energy.
Try to imagine this.
You’re in a meeting and suddenly the big boss enters the room and asks
“What’s your business idea about?”.
How will you respond?
You only have 60 seconds to make a powerful first impression to deliver your elevator pitch in a targeted, clear and concise way.
In that 60 seconds, you need to answer these questions:
What is your client’s problem?
How are you going to solve the problem?
What is the solution?
Who are your ideal clients?
Where are they located?
Asking these questions to Mobidock’s business idea, here are the answers:
What is your client’s problem? Answer: It’s space-consuming and unsafe to dock big bike motorcycle.
How are you going to solve their problem?
Answer: The product will dock the motorcycle conveniently and safely.
What is the solution?
Answer: Roll the bike into the Mobidock Docking Port until the front wheel touches the cradle and the motorcycle remains docked securely upright.
Who are your ideal clients?
Answer: Motorcycle Enthusiasts and Hardcore Riders
Where are they located?
Answer: Lives in the Philippines
This simple market-centric approach will help you better understand what your potential customer wants, rather than telling yourself, “Okay, I have a product, let’s sell this right away”.
Now that you know exactly who your customers are, next is to build a landing page.
Validate Business Idea by Building a Landing Page
Let’s define what landing page is for those who don’t know it’s purpose and importance yet.
Landing page is the URL where it contains the details about the product or service you are offering and a clear call to action.
When you build a market-centric landing page, I strongly suggest to give your visitors what you are expecting them to find.
Check out the Mobidock’s landing page below.
You’ll see a video that shows how to use the docking station. There’s also a visible call to action button that says ‘Pre-Order Now’. The message is clear to their target market.
Protip: Write a copy that speaks to your ideal client while addressing their problem and convincing them why your product/service is the best solution. Review your copy and remove any redundant or confusing words.
In creating landing page, I’d recommend you to try ontrapages. This is easy to use and doesn’t require technical knowledge.
I’ve created a landing page using ontrapages while writing this blog post. Check out the screenshot below.
Protip: Do NOT create a landing page that gives visitors a lot of options and multiple call to actions.
Drive Traffic
Once you’re done with the landing page, it’s time to drive traffic to it to test if there are people who actually want to buy your product.
In this case, I used Google AdWords particularly the Google Search.
I tried the Display and Remarketing networks but for the sake of this blog post, I will only discuss the Google Search.
Google AdWords captures your potential customers who are actively searching on Google Search for products or services that your new business has to offer.
You have the opportunity to only drive visitors to those who have interest and intent on your business.
To start driving traffic, I launched campaigns and set a comfortable budget to run on search network.
But before that, I’ve created a Google AdWords Account Plan for Mobidock. It contains the entire structure – from campaigns to landing pages.
To give you more idea on the step by step process of launching the campaigns, here they are:
Create a keyword list
Create a small groups of keywords that your ideal client would use to find your business online.
Protip: Think like your customer and speak their language when building your keyword lists.
Here’s what I came up for Mobidock keyword list:
- motorcycle dock
- motorcycle stand
- motorcycle docking station
- sport bike wheel chock
- motorcycle docking part
- motorcycle rear stand
- motorcycle center stand
- wheel chock motorcycle
- wheel chocks
Let’s say you have the keyword list ready. Next is group and organize your keywords according to a common theme. The image below shows you an example of the organized keywords used for Mobidock.
Protip: To help you create your keyword list, you may check out the Google AdWords Keyword Planner here. It is a tool for researching keyword ideas and their traffic forecasts.
After grouping your keywords, let’s proceed to creating text ads.
Create a text ad
A single text ad is consists of Headline, Description 1 & 2 and Display URL.
The example below are three ad texts created for Mobidock.
To help you get started in creating text ads, here are the tips to make them appealing to your potential customers.
- Highlight what makes you unique – Include text such as Free shipping, 24/7 Support or Free trial.
- Include prices, promotions, and exclusives – These are limited-time discount or product sales.
- Tell customers to take action – Include call to action such as pre-order now, purchase, call today, order, browse.
- Include at least one of your keywords – For example, if you’ve included motorcycle dock as a keyword, your ad headline could be “Order Motorcycle Dock.”
Test and measure results
This is the final verdict of all your efforts to validate your business idea.
Driving traffic is great but if your visitors are not taking action on your landing page, then you are wasting your time, money and effort to test your product.
If no one is taking action then you’ll need to work on refining your headlines, landing page copy, text ad copy or even testing different features and buttons colors.
After or while running your tests, you’ll get inquiries, leads, or pre-orders. That’s the time you’ll get a validation. The validation will give you confidence whether to move forward with your business idea or simply forget it.
Let us know how this is working for you. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
